As Rockefeller reminded his appointed Boswell, the affable William O. Inglis, a newspaperman recruited from Rockefeller's old nemesis, the World, but "for the urgent request of my son, who is not familiar with this history ... I would never have taken the time and the trouble to make any refutation to these questions." (Prelude, pg. xix)

Despite incessant disappointment, he doggedly pursued a position. Each morning, he left his boardinghouse at eight o'clock, clothed in a dark suit with a high collar and black tie, to make his rounds of appointed firms. This grimly determined trek went on each day—six days a week for six consecutive weeks—until late in the afternoon. The streets were so hot and hard that he grew footsore from pacing them. His perseverance surely owed something to his desire to end his reliance upon his fickle father. (Chapter 3, pg. 44)

Such was...